#connectedinEurope: Alba Iulia and Arnsberg enhance municipal partnership through smart city lens

With the legacy of many decades of a fruitful municipal partnership, the tandem of Arnsberg and Alba Iulia had great preconditions for an enriching smart city exchange within #connectedinEurope. 
Previously, the two cities had exchanged on their smart city strategies and projects more broadly. Notably, Alba Iulia is said to be Romania’s first city to have started comprehensive smart city development. More specifically, the cities had also exchanged on smart street lightning and the hosting of hackathons with universities, on Arnsberg’s sensor-driven measures and policies for climate mitigation and adaptation; and on Alba Iulia’s structural and organizational capacity of leveraging an astounding number of EU projects for their smart city development. 

At the most recent on-site meeting in November, the cities met in Arnsberg during festivities of the 50^th jubilee of their municipal partnership. A delegation from Alba Iulia was invited on a “climate walk” throughout Arnsberg to discuss particularities of houses and facades, identify the prevalence of heat islands and cooling areas of the city, and appreciate the results of renaturation of the Ruhr river in some areas. 

Arnsberg’s digital twin was used to illustrate and prepare the visit of areas with elevated flooding and precipitation risk. A representative from the consumer protection agency of North-Rhine-Westphalia provided additional discussion points on complementary measures for energy saving and flood protection, also from an individual citizen perspective.

In a working session, groups from both detailed out the project for mutually providing open data to be embedded in the open data portal of the partner city. This way, the cities are cross-referencing some of their lived realities in the citizen-facing digital realm.
The two sides concretely assessed open datasets for their potentials, after having sketched topics of mutual interest. The cities focalized data around urban planning (earmarked investments, city development plans and infrastructure projects); on climate data and flood prevention; and in the domain of micro-mobility. As a first step, they will select a number of static data on demographics and cycling infrastructure, with Arnsberg e.g. sharing a digital mapping of cycling routes and data from counting sensors.

A jointly developed roadmap will then lead the way to incremental additions, including dynamic data.

Finally, as a full testimony to the potential and synergies of being #connectedinEurope, the mayor of Arnsberg’s polish partner city, Olesno, also signaled his interest during the festivities to join the activities of Arnsberg and Alba Iulia, nurturing the vision of shared open data platforms of a European tridem of as a truly inspiring project.